Obviously, my favorite game of All Time has to be Star Trek: First Edition. It's the game I started with, and the game I've spent the most time with over the last twenty years. And if I had to pick a reason why, it would be that it's the only game that has a solid strategic aspect to it. While most games rely on the randomization of your draw deck, 1E gives you a seed deck to establish your defences and strategy.

My honorable mentions:

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Well, this is a bit of a weird one - CCGs, for all their talk of rarity and collectability, aren't actually that rare. Even Magic, first "Alpha" set - the first CCG run ever, had a print run in the millions. And while rares from that set can be expensive, there's still a thousand of them - each. The popularity is much more from demand than from supply generally.

So, I've got a ton of rare cards, but so does everyone else. Even the promo stuff, like the Fajo Collection and the Future Enterprise, aren't exactly "rare" - there are multiple people in town with copies of those.

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This one is another one that I didn't participate in, and it's another Regionals story. Might actually be the same Regionals as yesterday's story.

My wife played a lot more Trek than I did, and she was a solidly good player. (She was known for building diabolical mission stealing decks). For this regional, she ran a Patrol Neutral Zone deck, that had various tricks to kick the opposing player out so she could score 60 points per mission. (This was before Charvanek and the other PNZ counters). It was decently fast and brutal.

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I'm not what anyone would call a "competitive player". I mean, I like winning as much as anyone, and I always try to win in games. But when deckbuilding, I'm always more interested in nifty mechanics or unusual ideas than eking out that last bit of advantage. So I've ended up playing some very strange decks over the years (the Death Star Nine deck comes to mind), and sometimes they turn out to be really good (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to play League of Non-Aligned in B5 still.)

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Before last year, this would have been an easy choice - Netrunner. It's a brilliant game, asymmetrical game play, balanced on a knife edge, and impossible to find. And then Fantasy Flight released a new edition last year as a LCG, so, that's taken care of.

So, since my long-standing choice has actually come to pass, what game would I want to see next?

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I'm not enough of an art grognard to really get into the nuts and bolts of what makes a good card template, but as the Supreme Court says, I know it when I see it. And while there might be some newer games with better templates (I think Magic and Pokemon is on their third or fourth major template change each, and that's not counting the fancy alternate art versions), I can think of one game that got a cool template on the first try: X-Files CCG.

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Given that I have a closet full of out-of-print CCGs, it's fairly easy to find any given game that no-one wants to play.

But I do have one that no-one wanted to play while it was in print: Arcadia

Published by White Wolf, it had the idea of having no starter decks, just two different types of packs. Also, it took the "board game using cards" motif to it's extreme, putting a character card in packs that folded up into a little cardboard pawn (to move around the board).

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There's a lot of stuff that game companies do to increase collectability. Foils are common, for instance. (If memory serves, Magic still prints an entire parallel foil set for the crazies to chase after every four months.)